On Feb. 26, Gov. Schwarzenegger announced the creation of the new post, which gives head of California Volunteers Karen Baker a prominent role in disaster preparation and response planning.

Baker, whose new title is the secretary for service and volunteering, said "Government can't do it alone, and that's why I think the governor's smart to elevate” the role of citizen volunteers.

The governor was inspired to make the “radical” appointment, as Time magazine describes it, after watching volunteers in action during the October 2007 California wildfires and the November 2007 oil spill in San Francisco.

The timing may be just right. Since Sept. 11 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the country has seen volunteerism reach historic levels.

Blogging for New Orleans newspaper The Times-Picayune, John Pope applauds the overwhelming volunteer effort along the Gulf Coast during the two years since Hurricane Katrina. According to a federal report, Katrina volunteers have contributed services worth nearly $263 million.

Even untrained volunteers can make a difference according to experts quoted in a November 2005 New York Times article published in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Ophelia.

Kathy Bushkin of the AOL Time Warner Foundation told the Times that volunteering has become more common since Sept. 11. "We tapped into something so deep in people's need to do something," she said.

But heroic volunteerism is nothing new. When France fell to Nazi Germany in World War II, volunteers set out from the English coast in small private boats to rescue the British troops stranded on the other side of the Channel at Dunkirk. A descendant of a tugboat volunteer shares his family’s story on the BBC website.

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has created a cabinet position to manage volunteers. Time magazine calls it a “radical” move because “even though regular people do the majority of rescuing after almost every major disaster, they are the last people to be intelligently enrolled in the process.”

Energize, Inc., a Web site for leaders of volunteer programs, offers its perspective on volunteerism after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, including the logistical issues surrounding the overwhelming number of people who wanted to help. “This is the one time during which no one minds being called a ‘volunteer,’” states the article, written just two weeks after the attacks.

In an August 2007 blog post on the Web site of New Orleans newspaper The Times-Picayune, writer John Pope paid tribute to the 1.1 million volunteers who have donated 14 million hours of their time to the Katrina effort during the two years since the storm.

The San Jose Mercury News published a story about a Coast Guard report containing hundreds of recommendations for improvement after the uncoordinated response to the November 2007 San Francisco oil spill. According to the newspaper, “Hundreds of angry Bay Area residents were turned away” because they didn’t have the training required to help.

After Sept. 11, philanthropy leaders learned how to best administer public aid, including how to utilize untrained volunteers. Those lessons were important in 2005 after Hurricanes Katrina and Ophelia. "The respite centers and mess tent at Ground Zero were a good venue for people who were well intentioned, but didn't need a lot of training," Armond T. Mascelli of the Red Cross said in a November 2005 New York Times story.

Volunteers have historically played an important role in disaster relief. Alexander Kenneth Josh contributed a story to the BBC’s archive of World War Two memories about the work of his father and brothers, who volunteered to man tugboats rescuing British troops during the evacuation of Dunkirk.